And so I sit here at 3:30 in the morning on both the couch and the verge of making a huge descision. I've locked myself out of my room accidently so I'm stuck here until the landlady brings over the spare-spare key to my room later on today. And I find myself posting somewhere I'd like to visit a lot more asking people I barely know for advice.
You'll have to forgive me for putting my "problem" here, but I need to know that I'm making the right choice and the visitors of this forum are the most intelligent I've seen on the net to date.
About 6 or 7 years ago I picked up a crappy RPG editor and tried to make a game, one of those generic Final Fantasy knock offs that people never finish, only I never gave up when I realised the immense amount of work involved in actually making a game. My ideas grew, I turned to new development systems, roped friends into helping at intervals, I planned a huge distance ahead, laying down the blueprints for sequels and prequels, and all the while putting flesh and flavour to my concepts.
Skip forward to the present day, I've been fleshing out that world since day one, and it now stands an immense beast with a long, deep timeline, however all of my attempts at doing anything with it have failed.
I have a basic game engine, coded from scratch with its own scripting language and editing kit, given a few more years I could easily bring it to the point where it does everything I need it to, but a a game isn't something that you can do on your own, a lot of people need to be involved, but they all just pledge to do stuff and then run off silently when they realise the immense amount of work they offered to do.
At the end of last year I suspended the game poject indeffinitly, and turned instead to the medium of novels to express the immense world I had developed, I decided to run the whole project online, resulting in the site that you can see in my signature, wheren I would post the novels bit by bit, but this all targets a very niche audience, and its a niche that doesn't seem to be interested, in the 4 and a half months since the site went live it hit a roof of 3 readers who have now all gone elsewhere.
All of the people who followed the progress of Seten as a game have no interest in it as novel, and despite making efforts to spread the word nobody seems interested in my litterery work - the site is a failure.
I have 2 options from this point, I've analysed the novel and figured out why it is unattractive - because I introduced characters and concepts far too quickly, I feel able to take all that is there down and start over with a single unique and attractive part of the world, and then explain and present things very slowly from there.
However, the existance of the novels, and all of the real-life roleplays that I've been running based in the world recently have swollen the number of people who are interested in what I've done, it occures to me that I now have a far larger pool of people to recruit from, and that the nature of my now-finished degree has bestowed me with the communication skills to get accross the exact nature and huge magnitude of the undertaking I'd be asking from those people.
The biggest problem with expressing my world through gaming is that it is something I can never do alone, I have no right to ask those I know for their skills, particularly when the undertaking is something that will swallow up their lives for years to come, for me the sacrifice is well worth it, I enjoy my own work when other people are enjoying it.
Everyone my world has touched has been taken in by the sheer depth and flavour of it, from the many years and encounters with many individuals I know that what I have can bring joy to a lot of people, and so for me the sacrifice is well worth it, if I knew we would finish even 1 game, I would happily sacrifice all of my free time to do it, I would quit every game I play, put my newly constructed 40k army to one side, cut myself off from all of my friends, and even let my degree go to waste if it meant that just one game based in that world could be finished.
But in order for the sacrifice to ever be worth it, I need to convince others to do the same, to make that sacrifice and stick to it, not for me or my sake, but because they to beleive that what I'm trying to do is good, that its worth the sacrifice, and that they'll stand with me of their own free will.
And so this is the fork upon which I now stand, I'm tearing down the content of my site whatever happens, but do I go back to trying to develop the world through games, now that I have the larger pool of interestees to recruit from and am better able to put accross exactly what it is I need them to do, or do I stay where I am and carry on with novelwriting?
I need to know I'm making the right choice, my heart and mind are both equally divided on the issue, and I need something to push me to one side or the other, some factor I havn't considered, or a perspective on the issue that I havn't yet seen it from. I'm not asking you to make the decision for me, just to help me fill in the blanks I need to make it myself.
I thank you for reading this far, your thoughts on the issue would be of immense value to me.